The Top-Secret Burger Changing the Food Industry and 4 Other Links You Can’t Miss

The Top-Secret Burger Changing the Food Industry and 4 Other Links You Can’t Miss

The Top-Secret Burger Changing the Food Industry and 4 Other Links You Can’t Miss

There’s too much Internet—with wonders like this 18th century workout routine—and too little time. That's why we curate a list of the best of the best (a.k.a. "the Greatist") things we've come across on the Web this week. In other words, it's the stuff we'd email/gchat/tweet/text you immediately if we were besties. While we'll never stop striving to bring our readers amazing content on a daily basis, we know not all the best stuff comes from us.

Thinking about the sound of a burger sizzling on the grill or the juicy burst of flavor we get from the first bite is enough to make us salivate. But then we think of how industrial farming affects climate change and adds to water scarcity, which is enough to make us say, “Veggie burger, please.” Luckily our friends at Outside introduced us to the Beast Burger, a meat made in a machine that acts like a mechanical cow—consuming grasses, water, and oil and combining them to make a product that’s chock full of protein, calcium, and antioxidants. But is it meat? Or meat like? One thing is for sure: This is mind-blowing.

We know that smell can play just as big of a role as taste in determining whether we like a meal or leave our plate half eaten. But what about sound? Researchers at the University of Manchester found that sound can have a strong impact on how people perceive the food they’re eating. Have a lot of white noise (like a blender or dishwasher) running in the background? Food will taste bland and crunchy. On the other hand, if you’re chair dancing to your favorite melodies, food will likely taste more bold and complex. So, now we’ll be eating every meal listening to “Shake It Off.”

As we sit in our toasty office with a cup of just-brewed coffee in hand, it’s hard to imagine that just a few generations ago, when the mercury dipped outside, our ancestors dealt with living in the cold. And besides the potential for frost bite and hypothermia, living in the cold had some serious benefits, namely as a way of regulating weight and health. When your body is in full-on shiver-me-timbers mode, it draws more energy from the food you consume to keep your core temperature hot. That means less food turns into fat. So, what happens when researchers try to mimic these chilly environments today?

A stick of Burt’s Bees peppermint lip balm always sits next to us on our desk—and yes, we did just reapply (it’s hard to read a story about lip balm and not think about how chapped your lips are). But even as amateur connoisseurs of ChapStick, we never imagined a forum like Lip Balm Anonymous existed. As Refinery29 explains, it’s a space where so-called addicts talk about reapplying lip balm hundreds of times a day, often as a subconscious habit to reduce anxiety.

In the last year, it seemed like every few days we’d hear about another instance where someone in the public eye was made to feel bad about the way they looked. There was the time that people freaked out when Prince Fielder bared it all on the cover of ESPN’s Body Issue, or the time Diplo took to Twitter to talk about the size of Taylor Swift’s backside. It quickly became too many times to count. Luckily our friends at BuzzFeed rounded up the biggest body shaming stories of the year in hopes that things take a turn for the better in 2015.